CFP2008 traditionally starts off with a day of tutorials.
I was on a panel organized by Lillie Coney of EPIC on E-Deceptive Campaign Practices: “Elections 2.0″, which was extremely interesting; I discussed examples of, and responses to, e-deception based on my activism experiences this election season, much of which I’ve blogged about here already.
Tova Wang of Common Cause moderated, and the other panelists included John Phillips of Aristotle, Jenigh J. Garrett of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Ruchi Bhorwmik of Senator Barack Obama’s office, talking about the legislation he’s introduced banning certain deceptive campaign practices relating to knowingly and intentionally spreading false information about voting times and locations. The audience was extremely involved — and knowledgable — and the conversations during the breaks were great as well. Aldon Hynes already has an interesting followup post in Project VoteProtector on his blog Orient House.
Wednesday’s a big day, with the official opening followed by a session on Technology Policy and the Next Administration with representatives from the McCain and Obama campaigns. We were freaking out earlier today when the originally-scheduled McCain representative had to cancel … while there are plenty of interesting people attending CFP who would have good perspectives on this, it just wouldn’t have been the same as having a bi-partisan panel. Fortunately, after a lot of hard work, we were able to arrange another good speaker from the McCain camp. Whew. Of course, I’m sure it won’t be the last drama we have …
Wednesday afternoon, I’m on the Charismatic Content panel; and then Wednesday evening, I’ll be leading the Dear Potus ’08 kickoff at the conference dinner — Susy Struble, who had the original idea, tore an Achilles tendon and can’t be there in person. [Note to my former colleagues at Microsoft: think of it as “An open Letter to the next President”, constructed collaboratively on a wiki — Mediawiki, fortunately, rather than the Sharepoint wiki we used for the “Open Letter to Ray”.] Who knows how it’ll go, but it should be exciting.
Thursday is an all-day workshop on Activism and Education using Social Networks, co-organized by Deborah along with Jay Stanley of the ACLU. I’ll be doing a quick survey in the morning, and a session on dealing with hate speech, flaming, and trolls in the afternoon. My brother Greg (aka GregoryK) is leading a session on promoting books — I think it’s the first time we’ve ever worked together, which is kind of cool. The last session at the workshop is brainstorming on future evolution of social networks, led by Elizabeth Stark. We’ll get the results to Clay Shirky that night just in case he wants to discuss any of it in his closing plenary.
It should be fun, and exciting … and all-consuming; so don’t expect to see me much here for the next couple of days 🙂 If you want to follow along, the CFP 2008 blog is the best place for highlights.
Showtime!
PS: for more about CFP, please see my earlier post announcing the call for papers.